leaving the past, live authentically today

dark night of the soul

I thought about just stopping. No more posts. What was the point in it. A literary line drawn in the sand. Going round in the same circles. I am in pain, I am OK, I am woman hear me roar, I feel like death, I’m OK and so it goes. And goes, And goes.

It’s been 40 days since I got off the plane from America. 44 Days since he last spoke to me. 44 days of shutdown turnoff from him. And 40 odd days of me spinning the wheels of energy I no longer seem to have yet as I sit and write he is always there somewhere. Draining me amongst everything else. Snap out of it, I bloody well wish I could and there are fleeting moments when I have other things on my mind but this feeling, him, my life as it is encompasses me. I can’t seem to break free of this grip.

I have other issues to deal with, MANY, other issues…my existential crisis you know. I keep saying it. I thought a couple days of complete immersion and quiteness would help. It may have. Minimally.

I just read an article on letting go of a past love. Perhaps premature on my part because it seems as though he is not past to me. He still has a firm grip on my heart. Yesterday I tried to visualise, feel warmth and then the cutting of the chords that tie him to me somehow. No good. I meditated. My vision for meditation is usually the waves of the ocean rolling onto the sand and the beautiful calming sound. But over many months of our reconnect I would go to the beach and it was a way for me to connect with him even though he was far away. He came to me on a ship. He was in the Navy. We both have a love of the ocean. I would send photos and he would say how much he remembered of the Perth coast from his visit 30 plus years ago and the strange pull it had for him.

One day when I was there with him he asked me to talk to his daughter about buying a house in Perth, they both wanted to spend part of their time here. He talked about what a massive change it would be for me to move to Arizona, did I realise? He said it openly in front of her. I realise that he had thought about it all and discussed with her to an extent. Which is why when I play everything back in my head I find it so hard to understand why he could just close the door as he has. There is so much that does not make sense and his not saying a word from the day I went to the hotel, my last 3 days in Arizona, because he had made me feel so uncomfortable being there with him most of the time I felt I had no choice. But no dialogue. No words. Just nothing, is the hardest thing to deal with.

I read back my words here and it in no way covers the painful and hurtful elements of what happened, if anything it seems as though he is the good guy in all this. He is not. But when you love someone so deeply you are willing to overlook the bad things and you only look at the good things. There was more bad than good. Why can’t I knock that into my head.

Dealing with this only overrides the bigger picture maybe that is why I am focusing on him in part because it is an entity I know. I am so tired of all of this. I want my life back. I want to see the sun and appreciate it. I want to feel things again aside from pain and darkness.

All of the cliches run through my head “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”, “Life goes on”, “Life’s too short to be miserable, be happy”, google happy positive thoughts, strength and courage quotes, gratefulness and the like and you can spend all day reading the many veritable words of wisdom.

I want out. I want out of this NOW. I feel as if something is holding me firm as if I can’t move…inexplicable.

I just had a message about a business concept I have been looking at. Yesterday in a tiny moment of strength I called about information on it. Now I feel like I just am not ready. But I must. I need to work, I have a job to go to (they are still open to talks but I have not been well enough, I don’t know how much longer they will wait for a decision, no income coming in right now I m almost completely broke) but it is not what I want. I have a good brain when it is functioning well I know I want to work for myself and times now I try push myself towards action but that invisible weight keeps holding me down, it just won’t budge.

I booked myself to see the Dalai Lama a couple of weeks ago. He is here tomorrow. It is something I have always wanted to do, hear him talk in person. It means I must go out there, right now I don’t know how but I will do it. Life goes on, you must function. You must be part of things. You must not give up. You must earn money to live, you must eat, you must do what you can to keep a roof over your head…YOU MUST YOU MUST YOU MUST…..my head is spinning again and my heart is aching…when will this end?

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‘Reality check’ method does not work when one is in a particularly dark place! There is no sense in waving that smelling salt under the nose of the person in the dark, it doesn’t work and if the frame of mind is particularly bad it will only make that person feel even more guilty than they already feel and possibly expedite the possibility they will end their life. It is not that they do not feel compassion. It is usually that they feel too much, they feel everything very deeply. Hence I find people who think that reality check can apply to every situation just plain ignorant. I repeat, ignorance is bliss.

Yes I see hardship, pain and suffering all around me when I do see other things aside from myself and my pain. I have said again and again I know I am not in as bad a situation as others; I have food to eat, a roof over my head for now, friends and family. I feel guilty about that at times.

It’s hard not to see it when it is everywhere. And to force a person to see these things and expect them to just say ‘OK since others are worse off I’ll just snap out of my self indulgence and all will be better’ is once again a form of ignorance, if you have not experienced the black how can you truly know what it is like inside that persons head? What their set of realities are? Never assume, it’s not your place to.

You don’t have to be destitute to be feeling like life is not worth it. You can be rich and successful and still decide you don’t want to be here as the pain is just too much…look at Robin Williams, L’wren Scott, Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence.

If you are blessed with a well functioning mind I applaud you. Be grateful, you are truly blessed. Use your powers for good not evil! The world has enough evil to go around.

A day of mind numbness again yesterday, alcohol. It is nice while it happens but the end result is the same, it only lengthens and exacerbates the time you spend in the dark. I take one step forward and three steps back when I do it. It must stop. The nine months I spent communicating with Joe I hardly touched alcohol, his influence. There were some good things that came of our reconnect, I can acknowledge that now. But I am starting to find myself disliking him intensely. I think I am in the anger phase of this process. The part where he is involved, in my whatever this is. Every time I am forced to recall my trip to the States to see him, when around friends, I start to see the reality of the situation. This is when reality check does work.

The only reason I know what day it is right now is because it sits on the right hand corner of my laptop screen. I have another doctors appointment later today, no not psych although I wish it was, my writing is my psych right now.

I simply do not feel I even want to rise out of bed today. What for? Will this feeling ever end? The days seem to blend into one, its been well over a month. When does it end? I have to make a decision about my job, I am damned lucky they have offered me the time time they have, unpaid but still a lifeline of sorts. I am simply not ready for it. The work does not make me happy (who’s does I hear you say?!) but it is a job, I am aware to have a job in this economic climate is a godsend but I am not capable of performing within what I know is expected of me right now. The burden of expectation makes me feel sick to my stomach, it messes with my head, it is a reality check..you need money to survive…you need money for support but when your mind is a haze of chaos and sadness it’s one reality that is so hard to take….

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Was a very dark day yesterday. After I posted my piece I lay in bed sobbing. I felt wretched. I literally felt like everything was leading to a kind of death. And once the tears slowed I lay there in complete exhaustion. I spent a good part of the day sleeping. It was better than the nothingness scattered with thought chaos.

At those times most would recommend that I have far too much time on my hands to think and therefore I should just get on with it. Ignorance is pure bliss. Oh to be ignorant.

Later in the day I started to read about many things trying to make some sense of my inner torture. I have no choice right now I had a call from my psych’s office telling me that after just one appointment last week, my first finally accepting help, they have messed this weeks appointments up and have no room for me and that she is then taking 2 weeks leave.

My first session was draining but helpful and I left feeling hopeful and now once again, a letdown. I can’t help but feel that my life is series of letdowns. Joe my most recent huge letdown. Yes, I was back to thinking about him today it never seems to end its like my mind is trying to make sense of what happened still and I am constantly battling with it to try shut those thoughts of him out but to no avail. His tactic has succeeded in holding me prisoner in the realm of no answers…

. I woke feeling as if there was just something he was not telling me or didn’t tell me and that it has been left for so long now it’s just too late. But that is just my mind, my ego trying to make it sound like I held some importance in his life when the truth is probably more that he just did not give a shit. Full stop.

It’s not just him, this situation with him is like a metaphor for the dark night existential crisis I seem to be wading in.

As I said yesterday the only thing that could silence these thoughts and feelings are mind numbing drugs or alcohol but I no longer feel that is the way out. This shit is going on for a reason surely.

I keep referring back to the Dark night experience, it somehow resonates.

“The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.” I have read many of Eckhart Tolle’s books including “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now” and find people such as he to be amazing individuals who seem to have somehow evolved past the ego and self importance, yet have alot to share.

There are many other web pages and blogs devoted to growth and experience of the dark night. As I read people’s own experience with it I feel I am not alone or going mad and I had always felt this was not quite depression but I could not explain it.

One article explained that you have 4 such Dark night processes where the fourth results in dropping all identification, physical death and transformation. It is as alarming as it is a wonderful fascinating alternative to our life and spiritual processes.

I am trying to find my way out of the nothingness and meaninglessness. Today is a better day because at least I am searching for meaning. One day at a time.